Organizers: China Institute for Visual Studies, China Academy of Art
Long March Project
Chairs: Gao Shiming, Lu Jie
The China Institute for Visual Studies of China Academy of Art and the Long March Project have jointly launched the “CENTURY: SHENG PROJECT” research program. By taking the decades-long art experience of Zheng Shengtian as an individual case study, this program attempts to re-appraise the Chinese art history in the 20th century through employing an individual’s art and life experience.
This program encompasses a series of exhibitions and curatorial workshops. The inaugural exhibition is slated to be held at Long March Space in September 2016. The first curatorial workshop took place at China Academy of Art on December 30, 2015. The curatorial team pitched the thematic of “One Century, Two Internationales” and the impression of Sheng’s life “as a public square, bustled with people coming and going”, in hopes to advance research and further thought processes. During the workshop, Zheng Shengtian shared personally of his rich experiences and reflections on art and life. The participants conducted candid, in-depth discussions on topics ranging from century, the Internationales, the project, historical experience and feelings, public square and encounters, art and revolution – offering much inspiration for the curatorial team. The second curatorial workshop, which is set to be held at China Academy of Art on March 30, 2016 (Wednesday) will be chaired by Gao Shiming and Lu Jie. Zheng Shengtian will participate personally in the discussion, along with the attendance of Chinese and international academics, artists, and curators in the workshop to exchange experiences in history, discuss research directions, and advance curatorial ideas.
Zheng Shengtian – artist, curator, art media professional, and art scholar – has virtually become a household name in the art world. As an art educator, his students were the vanguard of the “'85 New Wave” while he was the pivotal supporter of the movement. His life is like a public square, bustled with people coming and going.
Spanning a period of nearly 80 years since his birth in 1938, Zheng Shengtian has witnessed the several eras in Chinese art history and has bridged the two types of Internationales. In the mid-1950s, when Mao Zedong proposed the policies of “letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” Zheng Shengtian, then a junior student of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, was deriving avidly of artistic and literacy nutrients from various sources. He thought Socialist art had many possible facets and was far from being standardized. At that time, Zheng Shengtian sustained a Socialist-Modernist Internationales.
In the course of development in Chinese art, under the mainstream current of Socialist Realism was a surging Modernist undercurrent that passed on from older generation artists such as Lin Fengmian, Wu Dayu, Ni Yide, and Pang Xunqin who once studied in France and Japan, to the next generation of artists such as Wu Guanzhong and Dong Xiwen. Zheng Shengtian, who studied under a number of senior artists, was encouraged to explore works of foreign left-wing artists that did not fall into the category of Realist art. These artists included “the big three” painters in Mexican murals, Guttuso and Picasso, and so on. The visits and lectures from artists such as Siqueiros, Venturelli, and Popa from Socialist bloc countries in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as large-scale art exchanging exhibitions held in China with various countries, have impelled the Chinese art world to extract ideas from means of Nationalist art, Modern art to commence different artistic attempts. In China at that point, the ideology resulted from the Cold War awareness that identified Realism as equated with Socialist Realist art and as a diametrical opposite to Modernism was yet to be solidified. The young art student Zheng Shengtian acquired internationale concepts based on Socialist Modernist art and was not constrained by a fixed art formula. The Socialist art, upon which he pinned hopes, shall have greater abounding possibilities.
In the early 1980s, Zheng Shengtian, as the first person in the Chinese art world funded and dispatched by the Ministry of Culture for overseas exchanges, had traversed the United States, Mexico, European countries and the Soviet Union, and brought back news in the art field from different countries and regions of the world. He shared information with the Chinese art world while a continuation of Modern Art senses in him had come to life. He put on papers of his knowledge and reflections, explored new trends in the progression of art, and promoted forms of exchanges such as teaching, writing, and exhibitions between Chinese and international art institutions. With the dual advance in practice and conception, Modernism was no longer able to envelop the radical experiments by the younger generation in the art field. The argumentation on doctrines falls easily into narrow-mindedness. What was more important was to cultivate and reach new heights in thoughts and art. Zheng Shengtian knew very well of the impairments of solidification and conservatism and kept an open mind to new things. Thus, he boldly encouraged young people to make explorations and attempts, even acted as a safeguard and go-between for them to nurture their budding artistic potential. From then on, he was committed to the introduction of a “contemporary” Internationale, an internationale conception that is found in him to this day.
These two Internationales co-exist in Zheng Shengtian in a natural manner– a rare phenomenon among his contemporaries. The two Internationales are not equivalent to the term that is gradually reduced to a vapid expression by Capital Globalization. Rather, they are endeavors made to divest from the state of crisis at the time and place. The first Internationale embodied in Zheng Shengtian on one hand was the heated debate set off by socialist bloc countries on matters as the international communist movement routes and strategies after the 20th session of the CPSU in 1956, and on the other hand, it took place in context of the cultural exchanges between China and third-world countries following the 1955 Bandung Conference. As far as a young art student was concerned, the catching experience of seeing great artists such as Siqueiros, and new artistic styles produced by Venturelli after his long-term exchange experience in China carried great conviction. Therefore, this Internationale is reflected specifically in a methodology that has mutual tolerance in diverse forces and maintains the diversity of artistic presentation.
The second Internationale embodied in Zheng Shengtian, on one hand was due to the gradual expansion of the social climate at the time when the art world still maintained a conservative discourse. Urgent changes were required in the condition where a singular artistic form was chained to the conservative power. On the other hand, art existed in diverse forms and varieties in foreign countries. After the lift of the functional requirement for art to serve politics, the purpose of art became the question contemplated by Chinese artists. At the time, the passion for resources in Western Modernist art was quickly consumed before it was further explored, and was reduced to a mere imitation of formalism. The assurance to grasp China's society and sensibilities of the time were never addressed responsibly as they passed by instantly. After the elimination of direct obstacles posed by the binary oppositional discourse of Cold War ideologies, answers were not apparent to questions such as how do people walk out of the shadows of the Cold War, or how to construct visual art in a Post-Cold War era. They required dialogues and interchanges between the different worlds.
The transitions of history never happen overnight. Rather, They were immersed in the lives of the people of that time. Zheng Shengtian, in later years, published a set of books “Collection of Essays” to transcribe his artistic experiences and thoughts over his life. The four-volume set is composed of collected essays on visual art, cultural exchange, biennales and art fairs since the 1980s, and a memoir of his personal story. Zheng Shengtian continues to advance on his spontaneous artistic journey. His observations, responses, and actions made in the eras he underwent have provided abundant research resources in helping us reviewing the history of the previous century. In this long-lasting century, different revolutionary and post-revolution historical forces intertwined with one another, while Cold War and Post-Cold War patterns and discourse were obscure and ambiguous. Through Zheng Shengtian, we can review the surge and compilation of historical forces as undercurrents in the context of a more comprehensive history. In the intermingling and overlapping historical memories, the life of Zheng Shengtian is as if orchestrated carefully by history itself. His life can be seen as an art project. His works are just footnotes. His existence is far more important. We may call it the “SHENG PROJECT”.